


If you're not really here, then the stars don't even matter

by leiascully



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-22
Updated: 2011-09-22
Packaged: 2017-10-23 23:26:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no point in stars anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If you're not really here, then the stars don't even matter

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: Post-6.11  
> Concrit: Welcome  
> A/N: I had to write a sad story after "The God Complex". Amy's gone through an awful lot this season. This is from Rory's POV, which doesn't really help matters, but these things happen. Maybe I'll write Amy's story next. Thanks to Sam Sparro's "Black & Gold" for the title.  
> Disclaimer: _Doctor Who_ and all related characters are the property of Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat, and BBC. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

Amy mopes around the house for weeks after the Doctor leaves them in the park. Rory leaves her alone. There's nothing he can say. He's still aching from the loss of Older Amy, still dreaming of her face at night. He loves his wife and he loves the wife he would have had. He thinks of his own guilt. He thinks of the Doctor's guilt, multiplied by a thousand or a million or a billion or more. No wonder the Doctor abandoned them here with the best gifts he could give. It was better than listening to them die outside the TARDIS, their hands separated by a pane of glass and their hearts separated by a wall mortared by old betrayals.

Older Amy. He thinks of her in capital letters, with guilt and melancholy. It wasn't the lines on her brow that scared him. It was the bitter words that she said, the coldness in her eyes, the fierce angry yearning as she looked at him, and the way she could turn it off in a second. Rory looks at his Amy, the Amy he knows and understands, and his heart feels hollow at the injustice of it all. She is a miracle. She is a missed chance. She is his impulsive, passionate, clever wife and there is more in her than she even knows. Another injustice. Sometimes he is angry at her for not being her older, wiser, sadder self; in those moments he knows he is really angry at himself for leaving her there, thought it would have meant losing those thirty-six years beside her.

They have been through horrors together these past two years: himself stranded for two thousand years as a plastic soldier, Amy stolen and replaced by her ganger, Amy pregnant and alone at the last, Melody taken from them and turned into a stranger, Amy turned into a wooden doll, Amy stranded in the wrong timestream and left behind again. His own life extinguished and erased, nearly lost forever. The sick longing he felt seeing her older face, knowing how much of her life he'd missed, how much of her growth. Amy's room filled with the terror of losing the Doctor. Amy's life filled with the reality of losing the Doctor, the image she'd had of him and the reality of their time in the TARDIS.

There has to be something more happening. His thoughts are blurred at the edges. He's not sure if it's the stress of the decisions he's made or the numbness of life outside the blue box that's bigger on the inside. He works long hours at the hospital. Amy reads job adverts and history books. They talk, briefly, about trying for another baby, but they both fall silent, thinking of Melody and of River. Knowing who she'll be (or is - Rory's shady on the time travel tenses) doesn't help the fact that they have an empty room upstairs that would make a perfect nursery and an empty space in their lives.

Amy suffers. Rory suffers too. At least he was never the girl who waited; he knew the person he was waiting for was locked in the mysterious cube at his back. At least he was never the one pining for the Raggedy Doctor while a crack in his wall whispered into his dreams. At least he dreamed of Leadworth too, and not only the unspeakable beauty of the night sky. The best he can hope when he holds his wife at night is that she can share that dream.

The first time Amy writes "Amy Williams" on something, it gives him a little thrill. It also makes him a bit ill. He immediately covers the paper with his hand. "You're Amy Pond. You've always been Amy Pond."

"I thought you'd be happy about it," she says. "Amy Pond was a bit fairytale, remember?"

"You're more than a fairytale," he tells her. "You're a real-life hero. You've swashbuckled with pirates and you've faced down the weeping angels. I don't want you to do things to make me happy. I only want you to do what you want to do."

She gazes into his eyes for a moment and then scratches out the "Williams" with a couple of quick strokes and writes "Pond" with a firm steady hand. "Maybe someday. It isn't you, Rory, it's just...."

"I know," he says, and kisses her forehead.

Autumn turns into winter. Rory walks home with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his wool coat. It's one of those rare cold clear nights with clean snow on the ground and a sliver of a moon. The stars are perfect points of light. Rory stops by the park rail and looks up at them. He picks out Orion, those distinctive stars all in a line, and suddenly his cheeks are hot. He puts his fingers up to his face and finds tears on his lashes. There's no point in stars anymore. He'll never be close enough to really see them.

"You bastard," he says to the great starry dome of the sky. "You lying bastard. You sweep us up, show us one minute portion of this brilliant, incredible universe and then drop us here to live out our mundane little lives. What are you for? What is all of this for?" He grips the iron rail hard until his hands burn with the icy pressure of it. "Why Amy? Why me? Why our daughter? How am I ever supposed to look at the stars again? How am I ever supposed to make up for what I did to her older self? How will you make up for the things that happened?"

He knows better, in his heart. If Amy's ever to heal from her wounds, it'll be her who does the work. All he can do is come home every night and stand in parks swearing at the stars. All he can do is dream of other worlds. The Doctor doesn't apologize. He just faffs off back into the muddle of time and space to find another sucker.

"It should have happened to me," he tells the sky. "All of it. It should have been me left on the wrong planet. It should have been me breaking my heart over leaving you. Why does everything happen to her? Statistically, it's completely improbable."

The stars just gleam at him. Nothing happens. He didn't know what he expected. The Doctor comes at River's beck and call, but not his. He's always been auxiliary to their adventures, Rory the wet blanket, Rory whose dream is a quiet home life. Devoted Rory. Boring Rory. He's all right with that - he's shown himself up well at crucial moments. In the worst ones, though, he was no more help than the old man with the young face, whose two hearts don't seem to make him any more caring than the average person. The Doctor's really got no more clue than the rest of them as to what's going on, and no special powers either. Rory can't forgive him for that, but he can't blame him either.

He stands there a moment longer, glaring up at the sky. But there's no familiar blue box tumbling through the atmosphere. The Doctor won't tumble out and make everything better with his sonic and his habit of talking anyone into anything. There's just the blue door of his blue house opening and light spilling over the road.

"Oi!" Amy says, crossing her arms and leaning against the doorframe. "Are you going to be at that long? Because it doesn't do any good. I should know." She jerks her head to indicate the cozy, warm interior of the house. "Besides, there's a curry with your name on it getting cold."

"Sorry," he mutters.

"We all do our share of it," she says. "Hating him. Shouting at the heavens. Blaming him."

He walks up the steps and kisses her forehead. "It's his fault."

She shrugs. "Of course it is. And it isn't."

He gazes at her. A glint of her older self flickers in her eyes. He shouldn't forget that she stood on her own feet through it all, and saved him more than once. Sometimes he does forget, though. Sometimes he forgets that he's Mister Pond and that the choices were hers, most of the time. The Raggedy Doctor came to sweep her away, but she ran out the door with her hand in his. Who could turn down the universe?

"Would you trade it away?" she asks him.

A thousand memories flash through his mind: the most elating and the most devastating moments of his life. The best of times and the worst of times. The whole of space and time.

"Nah," he says. "I wouldn't."

"Well, shut up then," she says. "And get inside, it's freezing."

"I didn't say anything!" he protests as he slips by her and walks into the house.

"With your eyes, you did," she tells him. "And your whole stupid face." She closes the door on the stars and the night and the rest of the universe, but she smiles a real smile for the first time in months and that's all in the world he needs.


End file.
